Arcus

A mobile app designed to help young archers stay engaged by making their progress visible, meaningful, and encouraging. When archers can see how they're growing, they're more likely to stay curious, confident, and connected to the sport. This app supports that journey through intuitive tracking, gentle guidance, and a focus on long‑term motivation.

Many archers struggle to stay engaged over time due to limited progress visibility, manual and inconsistent tournament tracking, and a lack of tools that support the mental side of the sport. These challenges are especially noticeable among younger or newer archers, who often lose motivation when improvement feels unclear or overwhelming.

The goal of this project is to design a user‑centered archery app that supports archers of all experience levels by making progress easy to understand, simplifying tournament tracking, and providing mental‑training tools that strengthen focus, confidence, and long‑term engagement.

The problem doesn't end with the archer. League managers and club owners face their own version of it: hours of manual setup, scattered communication tools, and league administration that competes with the time they'd rather spend coaching. A tool that serves the people running archery as well as the people doing it removes friction at both ends.

I conducted surveys and informal interviews with local archers, league managers, and club owners to understand their motivations, challenges, and reasons for disengaging from the sport. Speaking with both archers and the people who organize their experiences surfaced different but connected pain points: archers struggling to see their progress, and managers struggling to set up the structures that make progress visible. I also reviewed existing archery apps to identify usability gaps and opportunities for a more engaging experience.

Pain Points

League participation plays a meaningful role in keeping archers engaged, regardless of age or experience level. Structured competitive environments offer clear progress tracking, consistent milestones, and a sense of accomplishment that can be hard to maintain through casual practice alone. By supporting league management within the app, I aimed to strengthen this ecosystem: making results easier to track, reducing administrative friction, and helping archers stay connected to their community.

For Holden, simplifying league setup and score tracking not only improves his workflow but also directly benefits the athletes he supports. Clear standings, organized results, and accessible progress data contribute to a more motivating and rewarding experience for archers, reinforcing long‑term involvement in the sport.

To evaluate the clarity and usability of the core features in the Arcus app, I conducted a hybrid moderated and unmoderated usability study. I began each session by being available to answer questions and observe initial interactions, then allowed participants to explore the prototype independently over several days. This approach helped me understand both first‑impression usability and real‑world usage patterns.

Alongside testing my own designs, I also aimed to learn what users felt was missing from the archery apps they currently use and what additional benefits they wished those tools offered.

This hybrid study provided a balanced view of both guided and natural user behavior. The insights helped refine the app's core flows and validated the need for a tool that supports both the practical and mental sides of archery. By understanding what users struggle with in existing apps, I was able to design an experience that feels clearer, more supportive, and more aligned with how archers actually train, compete, and grow.

Based on user feedback and gaps identified in existing archery apps, several opportunities emerged to further enhance the experience for both archers and league managers.

With usability insights applied, every screen comes to life. These screenshots capture the launched Arcus app as it first arrived in the App Store.

Launch wasn't the finish line. It was the moment Arcus stopped being a concept and started being shaped by the people who used it. The weeks following release brought feedback I couldn't have anticipated from research alone: insights about who archers really are, how they actually train, and what they need from a tool meant to grow with them. The updates below reflect that listening. Not a feature dump, but a steady response to what users showed me mattered.

Archery is a more social sport than tracking apps tend to acknowledge. Most archers train alongside teammates, learn from coaches, and shoot inside structured leagues. The earliest post‑launch additions were about meeting that reality.

Live Scoring lets archers shoot the same session in real time, regardless of whether they're standing on the same line. A host creates a room, others join with a short code, and scores update live across every device. A resume banner picks up sessions interrupted mid‑shoot, so a phone call or a coaching break no longer means losing the round.

The Coaching Hub gives coaches a dedicated space to communicate with their archers, privately or in group chats organized around teams or training cohorts. It moves coaching out of scattered text threads and into the same app where progress is already being tracked.

The League Dashboard came directly from a request by John Savage, manager at Ace Archers, who was losing hours each week to manual league setup and standings updates. The dashboard lets managers create and run multiple concurrent leagues, while members and visitors can follow standings in real time. It's the first feature in Arcus designed for a different user role entirely: not the archer, but the people running the room they shoot in.

One of the clearest post‑launch insights was that an archer is rarely just one kind of archer. The same person might shoot recurve indoors on Tuesdays and barebow outdoors on Saturdays. The original app forced them into a single identity. The updates in this theme restructured the app around the truth: identity in archery is plural.

Profiles now support multiple bow classes and divisions, with shooting profiles automatically created for each archery‑style and venue combination. Switching between them takes a single tap, and the rest of the app (stats, achievements, history) adjusts to match.

A persistent Indoor/Outdoor and bow‑class filter now lives across Home, Stats, History, and Achievements, removing the friction of re‑selecting context every time an archer moves between screens. The new Home page also surfaces session types (Practice, Live Scoring, Tournament, League) as direct entry points.

The original analytics view spread its data across multiple screens, with some metrics getting cut off mid‑chart. The redesign condenses the same information into a single, clear view, and respects the active venue and bow‑class filters, so an archer's outdoor recurve stats are no longer mixed with their indoor compound numbers.

Some of the most important post‑launch changes came from a single user, a single observation, a single fix. These are the small updates that don't show up in marketing copy but earn long‑term trust.

USA Archery pin levels are a meaningful achievement system for serious competitors, and Arcus's original logic only counted the most recent five sessions toward pin progress. A user with years of imported historical scores reported that those scores weren't being recognized, effectively erasing their existing pin levels. The fix now uses all‑time scores, restoring credit for the work archers had already done before the app existed.

Like the League Dashboard, the integrated shot timer came from a direct user request. Andrea asked for it so she could stop juggling two apps during practice: one for scoring, one for timing. The timer is built around the USA Archery standard shot clock and defaults its time‑per‑arrow based on the active session type, with manual adjustment available for non‑standard formats. It mirrors the cues archers already know from competition: audio beeps match the familiar tournament pattern, and the display shifts color at the 30‑second warning. The screen rotates automatically with the phone so the timer stays readable however the archer holds it. When the round completes, it returns to the scoring page on its own so the archer doesn't lose their flow. A manual exit is always available.

The Shoot page picked up two small but high‑impact additions: a manual entry button for quickly logging completed practice sessions without running a live tracker, and a session‑type filter on the history list so archers can isolate practice, scoring, tournament, and league sessions independently.

The usability study provided clear direction for refining the core experience of the archery app. By observing both guided and independent interactions, I gained insight into how archers and league managers naturally navigate the interface, what they value most, and where they encounter friction. The improvements made thus far have significantly strengthened the clarity and usability of the app's foundation.

Beyond immediate design changes, the study revealed deeper opportunities to support the archery community. Users consistently expressed a desire for features missing in existing tools, such as better league management, clearer standings, and more personalized motivation. These insights helped shape a roadmap of future enhancements, including automatic lane assignment, streamlined navigation, and communication tools for coaches and athletes.

This project also reinforced my own growth as a designer. I learned the value of giving users space to explore independently, the importance of listening for what isn't being said, and how meaningful it is to design for a community I'm personally connected to.

The voices of the archery community ultimately decide whether a tool is worth keeping. These are theirs.